


Beautiful (Beast)

by verushka70



Category: Teen Wolf (TV), True Detective
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Anal Fingering, Anonymous Sex, Blow Jobs, Hale Fire Survivors, M/M, POV Derek Hale, Post Hale Fire, mention of past Kate Argent/Derek Hale - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 21:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6627151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verushka70/pseuds/verushka70
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Show me," Rust murmurs.  Derek lets his wolf out a little, just the eyes, the heavy brow, the fangs.  "Beautiful beast," Rust whispers.  He slides down the back of the bathroom door to his knees.  When he looks up with glassy eyes, Derek realizes it isn't just Rust kneeling at his feet. It's Rust and someone else.  Rust has shifted, in his own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beautiful (Beast)

They get to wherever in the sticks of the bayou they're supposed to be. Laura finds the pack Alpha they're looking for on the shaded porch of a tract house down a dirt road with wet muddy ditches on both sides. She gets out to greet him and briefly discuss whatever. 

Derek hears them make plans for a longer meeting later tonight while he sits in the car with the windows open. Moist, warm air with a metallic chemical aftertaste permeates everything around them. Laura hates the humidity here. The minute she gets back in and turns the car on, she'll roll up all the windows and put the AC back on. 

Derek immerses himself in the heat for now, even if it makes him sweat a little under his leather jacket. It's winter now, here, cooler than the rest of the year. He can't even imagine the torpor of high summer here. Thinks of tired dogs lying on their sides in the shade, trying to cool off, people staying inside, not moving, waiting for sundown to cool things off a little. Just a little, because the humidity is never gone. 

The humidity here in Louisiana is like a wave, a wall, like pressure. It's not the heat and humidity of New York City, where the buildings and concrete and asphalt reflect and retain heat, where the humidity comes from the river and the harbor but wind blows it away. And it's nothing at all like the aridity of California, whether mountains or deserts, where all the humidity comes from irrigation in valleys or the moisture of the coast and disappeares quickly inland or away from farming areas. Here it surrounds, soaks in to everything, rots.

Laura gets back in the car after a few minutes and as soon as she starts the car, the AC blasts cool air, evaporating the sweat on Derek's upper lip and under his open jacket. She puts the windows up immediately as Derek predicted, but it's not bad, it just is what it is, and he experiences the new sensation like he did the humid heat: something to sense, to feel, to take him out of his head and into his body.

They drive down long flat rural roads that combine the obscene greenness of everything, kudzu hanging off overgrown trees over watery ditches, with the rusting externals of corrugated metal and hulking chemical plants, the horrible vapor and aftertaste still present in the air conditioned car. Finally they see a bar.

"Maybe we can get something to eat there," Laura says, turning into the small parking lot.

"Maybe," Derek replies dubiously. 

He could eat, but he's not starving. And it doesn't look like they serve food. Actually, something cold to drink would be good. But no, there's no food. There's one guy sitting at the corner of the bar, his forehead pressed against his folded hands. 

Laura picks a spot at the opposite end of the bar from the passed-out guy, three stools from the corner opposite. Derek slides onto the stool next to her. 

"Hullo," the bartender drawls.

The other thing this bar has got is a hollow-cheeked bartender whose laconic voice, ratty pony tail, and scraggly mustache contrast sharply with his dead eyes and the hard, smooth muscle visible under his shirt. 

Derek listens to the bartender's heart beat, slow and steady, and gets the sense that it somehow spites the man with its reliability and regularity. He's clearly older, forty-something, Derek would guess, but he doesn't look old so much as he looks weary at his edges. The lines in his face are less from age than from what he's lived through, Derek senses with a brief, unexpected pang of sympathy. Yet his straight posture and relaxed-but-ready-for-anything presence indicate he can hold his own -- in any given situation. It gives Derek pause.

It doesn't hurt that under the pony tail and mustache and the air of can't-be-bothered-with-that-shit, he's attractive. He has an air of wounded self-sufficiency. Derek can relate. Plus he smells clean, of soap but not cologne or any artificial scents. Clean and human and masculine. 

Laura asks the bartender if they can order food to be delivered. He shrugs and reaches under the bar for two menus. 

Two. 

"Two places?" Derek says unhappily. In a two square block radius of their apartment in Brooklyn, there are probably twenty restaurants, stands, delis, and cafes. Not including the dozens more that deliver in a wider radius than that.

"There's more," the bartender shrugs, "they just don't deliver -- you got to go there. And most close early, two, three o'clock."

"Let's just pick one," Laura says, her voice a combination of tired, hungry, and careful not to accidentally order Derek to choose. "I'm tired of driving."

Derek doesn't point out that he could drive. The rental is in her name and he already offered. Laura has been control-freak-y ever since Alpha responsibility was suddenly thrust on her by... everything. He gets that, and she's a lot better with it now than she was in the beginning. When she wants him to drive, she just gets in the passenger side of the car, her way of asking without accidentally Alpha-ordering him to drive.

She takes the menus, orders a ginger ale from the bartender, and they lean together to look over both menus. One is for a diner called "TT's" and the other is for a bar and grill called "Dockside" which specializes in "Cajun food." Derek is obscurely glad it says "food" and not "cuisine." 

He quickly decides on a fried shrimp po-boy because both places serve po-boys so it doesn't matter which one Laura picks. He tells Laura and glances at the beer list behind the bar. He looks up at the patient, unnaturally motionless bartender waiting for him to order a drink, and orders a Lone Star. 

There is the briefest flicker of interest behind the bartender's dead eyes for a moment. Then he bends to get one out of the fridge, muscular back twisting under a sleeveless T-shirt and an untucked, open shirt over it with the sleeves rolled up. The un-tucked shirt hides a lot, but Derek can see that his wide shoulders taper to lean flanks, slim hips, a flat but muscled ass under his jeans. 

He pops the cap behind the bar, sets a cardboard coaster in front of Derek, and settles the Lone Star on top of it. His hands, Derek notices, are large and beautiful. His forearms are long and lean but well-muscled, his fingers thick with strength and delicacy. Hands like that make Derek wonder what the rest of him is like.

Derek shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it on the hook under the bar by his knees. Out of the corner of his eye he watches the bartender watch him take off his jacket. But the man's heartbeat remains slow and steady, revealing nothing. 

Derek picks up his beer and eyes the bartender a brief second before tipping his chin up and sucking down a long swallow of beer. It's not like he'll get drunk, but he does like Lone Star. He listens to the bartender's heartbeat while he watches Derek swallow. It skips -- once, exactly -- then goes right back to its steady beat.

When he puts the beer bottle down again, the bartender meets his eyes. The brief flicker of interest is there again and gone in a flash. Laura takes out her cell phone and calls the diner to order their food. Derek and the bartender look at each other, saying nothing. Finally the bartender relaxes a little, leans on the bar right in front of Derek while Laura talks on the phone.

"You don't use fabric softener," is his entirely unpredictable statement.

Derek blinks and pauses. "No," he finally agrees.

"Chemicals," the bartender nods. 

"Yeah," Derek agrees. "Don't like them."

"Driving around here must be killin' y'all," the bartender says. 

He briefly eyes Laura as she talks quietly on the phone. When his gaze returns to Derek's, his eyes are no longer dead, they're keenly interested and shrewdly appraising. 

"It reeks," Derek nods. 

"Home, sweet home," the bartender says in a soft, sarcastic drawl. 

The edge of bitterness in his voice makes Derek suddenly think about returning to Beacon Hills. How sickening that would be. He pushes back the fear of returning (of seeing _her_ again), swallows the taste and smell of smoke that rises unbidden, and swallows.

"You're from around here," Derek says. It's not quite a question.

He can't seem to stop looking at the bartender's eyes. Blue, but bluish-green one minute and bright, sick blue the next, pupils dilated. 

"My mother was," the bartender says, oddly formal about his mom. "Born here. Military dad. Grew up in Alaska."

Derek glances around the bar as Laura ends her call. "Half hour," she tells Derek. 

"What did you get?" he asks.

Not that he really cares, it's just something to say. Laura makes him feel like he should make the effort to communicate with the only family he has left. All they have is each other now, and she's the Alpha, not that she ever enforces much of anything, he's not sure why. Maybe it's pointless in a pack of only two because they're more like omegas together than alpha and beta.

"Oyster po' boy," she replies easily. She slings her purse off her shoulder and hangs it on the hook below the bar.

The bartender looks from Derek to Laura and back again. His eyes squint briefly, speculating, and Derek feels a strange urge to see how much he can figure out and how quickly. He gets more a sense of lawman than bartender, but then Derek supposes ex-cops are good to have in bars where things can quickly deteriorate.

Derek puts his arm around Laura's shoulders warmly, possessively for a moment. Laura gives him a weird look, but leans into him anyway and puts an arm around his waist.

"Naw," the bartender shakes his head. "Brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend." 

"That's right," Laura smiles, her arm sliding from Derek's waist and going to her purse on the hook under the bar. She's trusting. She has no reason not to be. "Jukebox?"

The bartender breaks Derek's gaze long enough to point his chin across the room, back near the door. Laura gets some bills out of her wallet. 

"Don't get any ideas," she says to Derek, wolf-quiet, as she gets off the bar stool. "We're not staying." 

"Perfect," Derek replies just as quietly, his eyes never leaving the bartender's face. He hasn't even made up his mind yet, isn't quite sure he and the bartender are on the same page. Yet.

"What ideas you got?" the bartender says softly when Laura's across the room, unaware she can hear. 

He puts his elbows on the bar, crosses his forearms, and leans closer to Derek. He blinks slowly twice, his heartbeat that same maddeningly calm rhythm. Derek thinks those slow blinks mean that once upon a time this hard man had someone to come home to and learned a little about flirting. Though it doesn't seem that was recent or like it comes naturally.

"You," Derek says quietly. "Later." 

The bartender leans away from the bar without saying anything and busies himself with a wet cloth, wiping the bar and then moving away a little. Derek thinks maybe he read him wrong. Oh well.

Laura's jukebox choices start to kick in. None of them will be country songs, Derek knows. An old Fleetwood Mac song, though, he wasn't expecting. She heads for the bathroom and the bartender comes back towards Derek, wiping the bar until he stops pretending it needs it.

"Why should I?" he asks Derek quietly. But Derek can tell from his tone that he's already made his mind up. He will.

"I'm Derek." 

Derek doesn't answer the question and the bartender looks at him as slowly and steadily as his heart. His eyes are more alive now than the entire time they've been here. They dart from Derek's hair to his eyes to his lips, his neck, look at his shoulders and his arms, and come back to his face.

"Rust," he says, his voice low and secretive.

Derek extends a hand. Rust eyes it a second before he grabs it. Firm handshake. They both hold on too long, each gauging the other. Derek watches Rust's eyebrows flicker, if not quite rise, at the strength in Derek's grip. When their hands part, warm and dry, Derek feels strong, callused fingers twist out of his own.

"You're young," Rust says then.

"Old enough," Derek shrugs.

"You been through some fucked up shit," Rust says, stepping back. It's not a question, it's recognition.

"Yeah," Derek agrees, not bothering to lie. "You too."

Rust nods. 

"You control your heartbeat pretty well," Derek says then. No point pretending they can't read each other, haven't already sized each other up.

"Got to," Rust says, leaning on one elbow on the ledge under the mirror behind him. "People get outta hand sometimes. No sense letting biology ramp me up, too."

Derek nods and tries something a little bolder. "Shifter?"

Rust's eyebrows do that barely flickering up thing again. "Don't know what that is," he replies neutrally, not betraying any hint of emotion.

Derek shakes his head. "You'd know if you were."

"Synesthesia," Rust says.

Derek knows the word but the meaning evades him for a moment. He casts back years, his mind scraping over the painful gravel of more recent memories to his mother's voice. Explaining something. The way tastes and odors sometimes have colors, vibrations, even sounds or musical notes.

His gaze snaps back to Rust's. "Can you control it?"

Rust shakes his head, once. "Just the response."

Derek stares at him a moment longer. "What else?"

"Neural damage," the man admits. "PTSD."

"You don't sleep much," Derek murmurs. Their strange recognition of kindred spirits makes even more sense now.

Rust nods briefly. "You neither," he drawls. "Bad dreams." There might be a hint of sympathy in it, but it's the kind of sympathy that isn't pitying. Derek is sick to death of pity.

Laura comes back and sits on the stool next to Derek again. The old man whose forehead has been on the back of his folded hands on the bar has not moved the entire time they've been there.

"This is Rust," Derek says, corner of his mouth turned up slightly.

"You're incorrigible," she sighs to him, wolf-quiet. "Laura," she tells Rust, and extends a hand. He does a perfect Southern gentleman's slight grasp of only her fingers. "Food'll be here soon," she adds. "Should've asked you if you wanted any, I'm sorry," she tells Rust.

"Not hungry, but thank you, ma'am."

"Oh, I'm not a 'ma'am,' yet," she waves.

Rust's mouth twitches up for a split second. "Laura," he nods, then walks out from behind the bar to the back, unlocks a padlocked door, and starts moving cases of beer.

When their food is delivered, the kid brings it to the bar. Laura tips him and opens the bags of hot food, inhaling the scent. Rust brings them extra napkins -- real napkins, not drink napkins -- from the top of one of the fridges behind the bar.

"Thanks," Laura says.

"Enjoy," Rust says, getting back to stocking the fridge.

Laura and Derek eat their food slowly, during which Derek drinks two more Lone Stars. The songs Laura put on the jukebox run out, silence once again filling the bar. Rust reads the newspaper with reading glasses. Laura elbows Derek when he starts on his third Lone Star. Rust eyes them over his glasses as she does, but says nothing. Laura pushes her plate away and glaces at Derek significantly. 

"I'm going to the bathroom," she says for both Rust and Derek to hear. "Then we have to go." 

"Okay," Derek says, swallowing his last mouthful of po-boy. 

"You don't seem drunk," Rust observes after Laura is in the bathroom and they both hear the toilet flush.

Derek doesn't meet his gaze. "I'm not."

"Shifter," Rust says, his voice lower. "What is that?"

Derek wipes his mouth with a napkin before he looks up and meets Rust's eyes. He lets his eyes go blue and lets his wolf out a little. It's not enough for the passed out old man to notice. But it's enough for his forehead to broaden and thicken, for his brow to protrude, for his fangs to grow, for his grizzled sideburns to appear.

Rust lets out a long, slow breath and Derek hears his heart skip a beat once more. Just once. 

"Living myth," Rust whispers and his voice might be a little awestruck. "Your... fur," he adds quietly, fine nostrils flaring. "Smells red. Brick red. Thick. Sounds like a deep hum."

"Yeah?" Derek says, his voice darkened by a thicker, longer tongue, by big teeth, by wolf vocal cords.

"We close at eleven tonight," Rust murmurs. "I live in back," he adds. "Be done about eleven-fifteen, eleven-thirty." 

He stretches a hand across the bar to stroke Derek's sideburns. They both hear the rush of the tap in the bathroom sink as Laura washes her hands, then the crank of the ancient paper towel dispenser. When the door to the women's bathroom opens, Rust takes his hand back, not quick, not slow. Derek looks down and shakes his head once, and he's back to normal, all human, no wolf. Laura slides onto the bar stool next to him. 

"The tab?" she says to Rust, sucking the last dregs of her ginger ale through the straw. 

Rust tells her and she hands him a couple bills. While he rings it up, Derek fishes in his pocket for his wallet and gives Laura cash for his share of the bill, then puts some bills on the bar for a tip. Laura throws in a few, too.

"Thanks," she says when Rust hands her her change.

"Thank you," Rust replies, suppressing the 'ma'am.'

"I'll hit the bathroom, too," Derek tells her.

"I'll be in the car," she says, and rolls her eyes at Derek. "It was nice to meet you, Rust," she says. 

Rust nods. "Have a good 'un," he tells her.

Derek slides off the bar stool and walks to the men's room. He doesn't look back; he doesn't have to. He knows Rust will follow. He pisses in the urinal and then washes his hands where the po-boy dribbled delicious grease on them. 

As he's drying his hands on the paper towels, Rust comes in the bathroom and hooks the lock behind him. He leans back against the door and looks at Derek in the bathroom mirror until Derek turns to him. Derek moves close to him, puts his hands on Rust's muscular upper arms.

"Show me," Rust murmurs. 

Derek lets his wolf out a little, just the eyes, the heavy brow, the fangs and sideburns.

"Beautiful beast," Rust whispers, his eyes darting from Derek's fangs to his brow to the fur at the sides of his face. 

He leans forward to kiss Derek's wolf lips, slides a hand under Derek's shirt and then into his pants, squeezes Derek's cock like he knew it would be hard for him. Derek kisses him awkwardly, trying to make sure he doesn't inadvertently bite Rust. He swiftly unbuckles his belt and opens his pants so Rust can stroke him harder, faster.

Rust slides down the back of the bathroom door to his knees. Derek thought this would go the other way, but this is good too. But when Rust looks up with glassy eyes, Derek suddenly realizes it isn't just Rust kneeling at his feet. It's Rust and someone else; Rust has shifted, in his own way. 

"Crash," Rust says, nodding up at him.

Delicate veins throb at his temple. There's a strange combination of desperation and easy accommodation in his voice and in his mannerisms, a casual certainty in the way he pulls Derek's jeans and briefs down. Rust's eyes go right to Derek's thick cock, bobbing just slightly to the rhythm of the blood pumping into it. 

"Crash?" Derek whispers. Rust looks up briefly before re-focusing his eyes on Derek's cock. 

"Yeah," Rust replies, licking his lips.

"Suck me off," Derek murmurs.

He slips his fingers into Rust's hair between scalp and the hair tie holding Rust's ponytail. He tugs and Rust's face bends to his cock, lips parting.

It's hot and slick and tight and fast and Derek is quickly panting at how good Rust sucks cock. He knows to squeeze and stroke the shaft with one hand while he uses the other to tug Derek's balls. He stops sucking just a second to suck and wet one of his fingers. He slides it behind Derek's balls, over his taint to gently circle and prod Derek's hole until Derek moans and lets it in. Rust's finger slides in all the way, fast, deep. Derek grunts with the pleasure spike and puts his hands, clawed now, up against the bathroom door, bracing himself. 

This is experienced. Almost, but not quite, professional. He'll come faster with Rust's finger working in and out; Rust won't have to suck so long. But maybe that's what Derek initially liked about Rust: he couldn't immediately read him, couldn't predict him. Hint of danger, but also of kindred feeling.

Even with his ass clenched around Crash's thick finger moving inside him, his hips thrust back for more, his breath coming in hot and fast pants. But it's somehow not the mechanical, efficient cocksucking Derek expected. Rust slows down, his tongue and lips like silky, wet velvet, his sucks long and lovely, the barest scrape of teeth and his mustache a feathery tickle when he goes all the way down. This is not just professional, it's personal, somehow. He takes his time, the suction of his mouth tight and hot. His tongue circles the head, making Derek clench down on the finger in his ass. He nibbles the frenulum until Derek's knees shake and he has to plunge his cock back in, thrust hard into the back of Rust's throat. 

Rust adds a second finger in his ass and it pushes Derek to the edge. Rust's neck, strong with muscle, goes slack and boneless under Derek's clawed hands. Derek pulls on it so Crash's face comes all the way down on his cock. Rust's two fingers fuck Derek's ass slow and deep and Derek comes hard. He spurts into the back of Rust's throat, his ass fluttering around Rust's moving fingers as Rust's throat flutters around the head of his cock. He growls and whines and fucks Rust's face, feels Rust's throat muscles swallow around the head of his cock in excruciatingly slow detail.

Rust pulls his fingers out then and Derek literally whimpers at the sudden absence, his weak twitches and spurts almost over. Spent and sweating, he pulls his softening cock out of Rust's hot, wet mouth; stands there, thighs trembling, knees shaking, now-clawless hands braced on the door so he won't sink to his knees to kiss the man kneeling at his feet, wrecked like he's wrecked, where doing *this* is the only time they feel completely alive.

"Eleven fifteen," Derek pants, eyes closed. 

He feels rather than sees Rust get to his feet beside him. 

"Yeah," Rust replies.

Derek's brow is back to normal, his fangs and sideburns gone. His eyes open enough to find that mustached mouth and press their lips together. Rust opens his mouth and Derek shoves his tongue in, tasting and smelling the combination of himself and Rust. Tight fingers grasp his shoulders hard enough to bruise though he'll quickly heal. He smells Rust's arousal and the flare of his desire. Rust's heartbeat is finally elevated, a staccato drum in Derek's ears though Rust isn't even breathing hard.

Derek's lips finally pull back from Rust's. "Unlock the door to your place at eleven," he mutters. "I'll be in your bed when you get home." 

His shaking hand on Rust's chest pushes him gently aside so he can pull himself together to go out to Laura waiting in the car. In the moment, it seemed to last forever; now he realizes it took only a few minutes. 

Rust slides a hand sweetly over Derek's left hip and ass cheek, caressing it once just before Derek pulls up his briefs and pants, and then zips and buttons and buckles everything. 

"In my bed..." Rust drawls softly. 

"Yeah," Derek growls, still panting slightly. 

"Man or monster?" Rust asks, like it doesn't matter which.

"Dealer's choice," Derek answers, eyes closed, pressing his forehead to Rust's.

"Can ya hold me down?" Rust whispers. "Hurt me?" 

It's a request, not a question. Derek understands this too. He knows the fear and exultation of knowing there's no escape from the coming punishment. He knows the beautiful shame and glory of helplessness, of being reduced to just a body responding, no thought but the drugged bliss of pleasure, of overstimulation, of total loss of control. 

"Yeah," Derek murmurs, nodding against Rust's forehead. "Carefully. My monster's... contagious."

"I'm already sick," Rust shrugs. "Damaged," he corrects himself, sounding like Crash again.

"Yeah," Derek whispers with a nod. Even to himself, it sounds more like 'me too.'

He slides his mouth slowly, wetly across Rust's lips below that ticklish mustache one last time before he shoves Rust aside, opens the hook-and-eye lock, and stumbles out the bathroom door. He heads for the bright light in the diamond shaped window of the door to the parking lot, squinting against the sun. 

Laura's nostrils flare slightly when Derek gets in the car. She says nothing as she puts the car in drive and he takes his sunglasses out of the glovebox to put them on. After they've been driving for five silent minutes or so, she finally speaks.

"Better?"

"Yeah," Derek sighs, like letting out a long held breath. It's not her thing, anonymous hook-up sex. But she gets it, gets that it's a hunger sometimes, doesn't judge. It's not like Derek can catch anything.

"Okay," she nods.

Another five minutes later, before he dozes off in the passenger seat, Derek murmurs, "Could you turn down the AC, please?" When Laura does, he adds, "I need the rental tonight. Around ten-thirty, eleven."

"I'll have the other Alpha come get me," Laura nods. She keeps driving.

**Author's Note:**

> What's better than one broken, beautiful man? Two of them. Together.  
> The idea popped into my head of these two PTSD men steeped in grief and loss, meeting up. How they would understand each other.  
> Un-beta-ed. All mistakes mine.


End file.
